The European Commission, which controls one of the world's largest science budgets, has backed calls for free public access to taxpayer-funded research. Reed Elsevier is not thrilled.

"Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research and they need seamless access to raw data," said Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda, though Kroes does not understand taxpayers are still paying twice. The largest open access publishers do tens of millions of dollars in revenue by shifting the cost from readers to scientists - who are taxpayer funded.

So it's a baby step, but a good one nonetheless. From 2014 all articles produced with funding from Horizon 2020 (($97.92 billion worth) will have to be accessible and the goal is for 60 percent of European publicly funded research to be available by 2016.